"That vague hostility towards humans keeps peeping through."
A story recounted here last year [0]:
During the development of the first iPhone, Ive and his team became enamored with the look of an extruded aluminum prototype. Even though it was immediately apparent that the model's sharp edges made it physically painful to use as a phone, they persisted in trying to push the design and paper over its principal practical problems. It took Steve Jobs to finally step in, point out the obvious, and check Jony Ive's worst tendencies. [1]
Steve Jobs is gone, and nobody is left to fulfill his roles.
They made laptops out of plastic that went yellow and fell apart when humans touched them under Jobs' watch. They pushed out plenty of thinner machines with fundametal thermal issues under Jobs' watch. They pushed out apps daubed in rich Corinthian leather under Jobs' watch.
This idea that somehow Steve Jobs was the only thing between Jony Ive and disaster has to stop. All design is hit and miss. Internal forces in large, complex organisations are always at odds with each other. There are plenty of examples of post Jobs' designs which are entirely pragmatic or just market driven, instead of being examples of someone's decadent taste.
Nit: ON Jobs' watch is more accurate — it's not evident (although it certainly could be true) that the cited developments occurred under Jobs's watch, i.e., that he was in fact overseeing those developments. (The term "on X's watch" derives from a naval expression: Event Y happened while X was "on watch," i.e., it happened "on X's watch," where the term watch refers to a time period.)
This. As CEO, one of Steve’s key functions was to serve as chief product officer. Design is an element of great products, and at Apple it has been a key element and key differentiator. As has been oft-noted, Tim is in no way a product person, and so without Steve we have seen design imperatives (thinness) unchecked
I often read these critiques that Steve Jobs was the one keeping Jony Ive in check in a way that Tim Cook can’t, and even if it is true, is there no significant criticism coming from below Ive?
As-in, is there really a full design team that are saying yes to Jony’s demands of an aluminium phone that is painful to hold to the point of requiring only the CEO to step in? Or does criticism from anyone below you not count any more?
Absolute dictatorship, no matter how enlightened, typically fosters a top-down culture that does not tolerate dissent. There is little doubt that Jobs was such a dictator.
There was a period of time while Steve Jobs was still alive and part of the company but had bigger things on his mind prior to his remission.
We saw this with the release of the aluminum unibody MacBook. There was no product differentiation other than the FireWire port. There were probably a few products that were far enough down the pipeline that couldn't be killed when Jobs was back for a brief period of time.
Jobs had plenty of design failures on his conscience, like the G3 cube, the skeuomorphism fad, and the hockey puck mouse. We should not pretend the guy had irreplaceable design sense.
Skeuomorphism wasn’t a failure. The iPhone and the touch interface were new to the market. Making the interface look familiar was important at the time even though it went too far. The iPhone did well from iOS 1 - iOS 6 and I don’t remember too many complaints until iOS 6.
Even today I feel like the new flat UIs are a bit too flat, like how some input fields (like in the Phone app on iOS) are completely invisible so you don't know that they're there.
Exactly. GUIs are supposed to look like things: buttons and displays, because the state of those things is immediately understood. Simple beveling and shadowing on a rectangle can tell you if the button is on or off. No one is calling for it to have a "brushed-metal" finish or dust motes on it.
Ive's (and others') asinine "flat" look tells you nothing. Buttons masquerade as plain text, and colored boxes next to each other are supposed to tell you which one (out of two) is active.
Apple's childish and ridiculous "skeuomorphism" wasn't just over the top and cheesy; it was just plain INCORRECT. They had controls designed to look like the paint on the felt surface of a blackjack table. WTF? You don't interact with the paint on a blackjack table in real life, so why the hell would I expect to do so in a program?
iTunes had a similarly defective UI: The "LCD" panel at the top (which was even depicted as having a sheen over it, to represent a glass cover) had controls in it you could click on. Again, WTF? You can't poke at the sealed LCD display on a tape deck, so... this is laughably stupid.
Yet year after year, very few decry the fallacy of reacting to plain old bad UI with even worse: the failure and design dereliction that is "flat" UI.
This. "Skeuomorphism UI is so bad, OMG" was just a journalistic fad/bandwagon when there was too many years of it and people who just get their opinions from op-eds. It will make its cycle back to fashion in the future.
In the first years, Aqua UI was praised as "lickable" and extremely pretty, and iOS skeuomorphic UIs wowed the world (and and where copied far and wide by competitors) for 5-6 years before any complaints.
Aqua was insanely good. Everyone else rushed to replicate it. Windows Vista/7 were “Redmond does Aqua”. The Linux DEs had craploads of Aqua-like skins. Given a choice, I’d love to get Aqua back. The “material” school of design is brutalist, sterile, and unloving, whereas Aqua was human, sexy, and comforting.
Yes, it became outdated after several years in use (6 on the iPhone?) and perhaps even didn't age well looking back on it. But for the time it was used it was definitely not a failure. Design preferences change, it doesn't mean everything that is replaced is automatically deemed a failure.
And unlike many other design trends that are purely about aesthetics, skeuomorphism also had a practical aspect: people had to "learn" a whole new way of interaction with these devices and using familiar shapes and textures helped. The "Start" button in Windows is called like that because people literally needed to be told where to start with the "futuristic" GUI.
Those examples are not the really bad aspects of skeuomorphic -- which is about not taking advantage of the unique digital opportunities for UI controls, and instead e.g. copying a DVD hardware interface or some other physical mechanism verbatim.
At worst, they're tacky. You can do equally tacky things in non skeuomorphic UIs.
But even that is just taste. All kinds of imitation materials are still used all around UIs and design, and still considered beautiful (e.g. frosted glass -- there's actually no glass. UI lights with diffusion, there's no real material to diffuse their light. Etc.).
Ipaq had touch 3-4 years before iPhone came out. Obviously not as slick. People seem to always forget that the iPhone was just an evolution not some kind of magically unexpected or unanticipated device.
As someone that was a daily iPAQ user with it Bluetooth tethered to my phone, they aren't even comparable.
The browser on the iPhone was actually good for the time. Touch actually worked, the display was responsive, they OSK was quite fast, and the lack of copy/paste was just dumb.
I ditched the iPAQ as soon as I held the iPhone and used it for five minutes.
I remember CRT touchscreens being used as cash registers in the late 90s. It's true, touch was nothing new. What was new was the combination of capacitive touch and a slick responsive UI. Previous systems had unresponsive GUIs or inferior touchscreen technology like resistive, IR or lightpen.
Getting both right at the same time was the big first for the iphone, not the bare concept of touchscreens as input devices.
What both you and grandparent are missing is the biggest iPhone touch innovation of all: multitouch. Multitouch was invented largely by a one-person startup that Apple purchased, and the iPhone became the first device to mass-produce it. The book The One Device covers its development well: https://amzn.to/2lrbKA7
IMHO multi-touch is really overrated in significance. The only multi finger gesture I use is pinch zoom and it’s like once a week. If that was a widget or triple tapping or something, I wouldnt notice.
The improvements to touch that made it magical was the super responsive typing and momentum scrolling and it’s all just one fingered.
Super responsive typing actually does depend on multitouch, because if you type fast then you will have multiple fingers touching different keys at the same time.
It's a stretch to call that multi-touch. The key press events are still a serialised stream of single finger touches. When people have spoken about multi-touch features and patents they have invariably been referring to chords and gestures.
I owned a fingerworks keyboard in 2003. The multi touch and gestures were amazing. And it was physically painful to type on. Try touch typing on a solid surface for any length of time. Fingertip bruises are no fun. The company mysteriously vanished shortly after announcing an after market multitouch keyboard for the iBook...
Touch interfaces were not widely used on much of anything prior to the mid 2000's. Yes there were exceptions, but it wasn't really used for general computing.
Seeing that I was programming ruggedized Windows CE based devices before the iPhone came out, I didn’t forget anything. But, the generally consumer market didn’t use Windows CE devices and Windows CE wasn’t exactly the definition of user friendly mobile design.
This is just like the initial reaction to the iPod on Slashdot back in 2001. “less space than the Nomad. No wireless. Lame” and why computer geeks don’t get the general consumer.
I strongly disagree on skeuomorphism. My parents learned how to use most of those skeuomorphism apps on first sight. It was absolutely brilliant, it may not look beautiful from UI perspective, but it was the easiest way to learn how to use it. Skeuomorphism isn't just about the looks, it is about how it relate to real world object that is instantly recognisable.
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I still remember I was struck hard when I could not teach my parents how to do double click on mouse, and when to use right click on windows in the early 90s. For years computing were merely a typing machine with a Screen in front of them. And serving the web as well as email has some sort of pain involves in the process. It was bearable for them, but it certainly wasn't fun.
I thought my parents were dump, but then later I realise majority of people not grown up in age of computing have similar problems. It wasn't until iPhone before everything was obvious. It was stupidly simple that you could leave it to them and they would discover how to use within minutes. Minutes, when you think back after years of using computer, from time to time they still ask when to use double click and when to use right click. Scrolling somehow become natural, something they fail to learn when using Scroll Wheels.
Skeuomorphism along with Touch Screen UI brings Computing to the rest of the world. And call me old fashion, I would much like a modern take of it than the current trend of Super Flat everything UI.
It's not that Jobs had irreplaceable design sense that makes Job's very hard to replace, but his ability to check egos and call out a bad design when he spotted it.
Everything I read makes it seem like Jony Ive is full of himself. Jobs was the only one that could tell him that.
I would add two more the iTunes music store and physical apple stores.
The iTunes Music Store not only helped sell the iPod, it was the reason they were able to stand up the App Store so fast. They already had the infrastructure and millions of credit cards on file.
The Apple Stores gave them a direct relationship with customers that meant they weren’t completely beholden to retailers and ttet didn’t have to compete for shelf space. Everyone at the Apple Store knew Apple products.
The misses are noteworthy for their relative rarity.
The G3 cube was a good idea but was overpriced, as it was inferior to the regular G4 in every aspect other than size. It was priced to be a 2000’s-era executive desk ornament, a relatively tiny market segment. A few years later a substantially similar product was released to massive success—the Mac mini.
The puck mouse was stupid, but it wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be. It was eminently useable once you got used to it.
Jobs’ biggest design failure has always been his refusal to acknowledge the importance of cable strain relief.
The follow-up to the puck mouse sucked just as much, because its entire body was the button... meaning you couldn't pick the mouse up while holding the button, to continue a long drag operation. Then the asinine "Magic Mouse," which somehow expected you to hold the mouse in position and then swipe across its surface horizontally with several fingers...
Not to mention media-centric phones without headphone jacks. Remember how services like Apple Music are supposed to be the company's future? Hey, let's make it HARDER for users to consume those services, by removing the audio output and battery life! COURAGE!
I'd go further and say Apple hasn't made a single good mouse this millennium. But their trackpad is the best in the entire industry. I've switched to the Magic Trackpad on my desktop and it's been brilliant. Not missing the grip-and-push mouse at all. The Razer Deathadder is back in the drawer and I'm very happy.
As for the headphone jack, if you think it was a stupid idea to remove it, you should save your vitriol for the "idiots" who copied Apple. Surely it's worse to take what you'd class as an obviously stupid idea and blindly copy it like a brain-dead zombie. At least what Apple did showed actual courage. And yes, I'm using that word entirely un-ironically. I personally think it was courage and they've been proven correct by the rest of the industry.
(Personally I'm glad they got rid of the headphone jack because it prompted me to get a pair of Bose QC35 headphones. Absolutely brilliant. Best headphones I've ever owned, and I've owned some high end ones. Meh. I'll leave the "good sound" at home thanks—when I'm out and about I care far more about blocking out the distractions than maximal audiophool wankery.)
I'm sure plenty of devices would fail if you block their entire cooling channel. Yes, it was a flawed design in many ways, but it wasn't far off the mark. The Mac mini proved that.
Alas the speakers that came with it have a custom USB wiring, so they can't be used on any other computer.
Otherwise it was an excellent machine - just a bit under powered. But really easy to upgrade - just lift it out
of the enclosure via the click-out handle and the whole machine was available to upgrade RAM and install a wireless card (when that was a novel thing...). Design was nice, fits on a desktop and was mostly silent except for the HD.
It was a 'fad', not a failure. It's also not even clear what Ive had to do with that, seeing as Software Design was under Forstall and it wasn't until the iOS 7 redesign that software design came under Ive's control.
At some point even Steve Jobs may have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of products, and we don't expect the CEO to be able to provide every product with love.
At some point the responsibility must fall on the design team and Jony Ives, because what is design if not the tasteful balance of factors resulting in a vision of experience, as opposed to the tunnel vision pursuit of maximizing on a metric?
> what is design if not the tasteful balance of factors resulting in a vision of experience
Determining the essential functional qualities of a product, and balancing these with aesthetics. When you throw in the industrial factor as in industrial design you're also considering cost at scale.
The comment paraphrases the story/book excerpt much more harshly than it's originally presented. I can't find the bit about Jobs having to step in and "check Ive's worst tendencies" in there at all. Here's the quote.
Jony and his team preferred the Extrudo look and gave it the most attention. They tried cases that were extruded along the X-axis, and some along the Y-axis. But problems surfaced immediately. Extrudo’s hard edges hurt the designers’ faces when they put it up to their ears. Jobs especially hated this. To make the hard edges softer, plastic end caps were added, which also helped with the radio antennas.
If you read further, you'll see that there were other factors leading to the abandonment of the "Extrudo" version as well.
Some small vestige of this remained. There is a sharp edge on the original iPhone 1 in the area of the headphone socket and you can cut your finger on it if you are not careful.
From 2013 ( 2 years since Steve passed away ) - 2016, the Ive era. We had
TouchBar Macbook Pro
Trach Can Mac Pro
12"Macbook
>Steve Jobs is gone, and nobody is left to fulfill his roles.
I guess Jeff Williams will at least being saying No to certain things, in terms of reliability and cost. But Steves cares about the user experience more than anything else. Which is something I am not sure Jeff is any good at, but if the Apple Watch was something he has his hands on, than I have lots of faith in him.
It is nice to read I am not the only one complaining about the new Apple TV Siri Remote. I much prefer the old remote, it was so simple and intuitive.
The problem is that a lot of people buy for the look, so the design sells. Apple made a significant effort to cast iPhone as a fashion accessory.
And once you bought it for a significant sum, the sunk cost will force you to learn and adapt, even through suffering, and look for justifications to comfort yourself and kill any doubts.
To quote from memory, "Steve Jobs cared greatly about the experience of the user from the moment of walking into an Apple store and all the way until the free return period ends".
To be honest, I prefer the "sharp" edges over the slippy rounded ones of the newer models because it gives a better grip. Your mileage may vary but I don't feel that old design uncomfortable.
Super shiny, glossy and smooth. And ridiculously slippery.
It can fall out of my grip when held with one hand. It can literally slide of a level surface (I have to be careful where I put it when charging). It’s amazing how many annoying things this decision to make it look shiny over functional has caused.
They are certainly not Sharp as in Sharp that it hurts. And I prefer the iPhone 4 design ( Current iPad Pro Design ) then the current rounded every corner design
I think it's good to draw a distinction between visual design and functional design. Design that focuses on function can sometimes (but definitely not always) result in designs that are also visually appealing, but design that focuses on the visual rarely produces a very functional result.
I'd much rather look at a mac book pro than a thinkpad. Next to the minimalist design of the mac, a thinkpad looks like you ripped out part of a server and started carrying it around.
But, I'd rather type on a thinkpad than on a mac. The keys are better (if not as good as they once were), the surface is neither too cold nor too hot to rest my wrists on, and the edge of the laptop isn't sharp like the edge of a mac pro. Once you start using a thing, the visual details melt away and the functional details take over.
I've owned multiple Thinkpads, and have a MacBook Air at home. I'm a pragmatist, so I don't mind that my work Thinkpad is all black and looks like it's from the 1990s. I enjoy that it has a built-in Nvidia GPU (which I use for machine learning). What makes me sad that with a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 install, my work Thinkpad can't even do two hours of battery life.
My MacBook Air at home is 3 years old, but it's thin and light. I take it with me when I travel, and the battery will last through a whole trans-atlantic flight. I don't actually care about the visual design, but the 2016 MacBook Air's keyboard feels very comfortable to type on, and the battery life is awesome.
Unfortunately, when this MacBook Air dies, it will probably get replaced by a PC. I don't really want to shell an insane amount of money on a new Mac, especially in an era where you can't get one without a touchbar, and I won't get the convenience of a non-USB-C port.
> What makes me sad that with a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 install, my work Thinkpad can't even do two hours of battery life.
This has everything to do with the unresolved problems of Linux power management. I use Ubuntu on Thinkpads too, and battery life is decent after a bit of configuration. Windows meanwhile gives all day battery life on Thinkpads.
I have managed to achieve the same battery life, down minute differences in the single digit either side, between macOS and Linux on a MacBook Air (which is a simple all Intel machine).
I think the problem is that most distributions ship with no Powertop or udev rules, plus lots of unnecessary services and devices on by default.
One really nice thing Apple does is optimizing Safari for battery life. My comparison was Firefox on macOS vs Linux. With Safari, I'd get 20-30 min more.
I bet Firefox and other programs would benefit from some black-box GCC/LVM flag optimization to improve battery usage.
Firefox on Mac's big battery life problem is apparently lack of integration with the system compositor. There's a fix in the works for this. Although I expect safari will still be better in this regard. Safari is pretty impressive.
Source:
I used a Windows 10 laptop (not Thinkpad) with Nvidia
GPU and it usually lasted less than two hours on battery.
I work on another laptop, Thinkpad without Nvidia
or AMD GPU, it lasts 6-8 hours on battery.
For a given CPU and battery capacity, Nvidia Optimus and AMD XConnect mean there's effectively no difference in battery life between a laptop with and without a dGPU, assuming you keep the dGPU disabled while you're using it. There are of course gaming and workstation laptops that run the dGPU at all times but you get what you expect with those.
Regarding the Thinkpad: I know this may sound crazy, but consider using installing windows, and using Linux in a VM. You get all the OEM and MS drivers for the hardware that way.
As long as I don't have to do hardware development, the Windows Services for Linux works pretty well for me with regards to command-line tools. I've been un-installing cygwin on my systems recently.
WSL is what finally got me to move off of OSX and back into Windows. IMHO, I prefer a thin MSI laptop to a MBP and a Surface to a MacBook Air. I'm trading my work MBP in for a Win 10 laptop with proper ports and docking station.
Interesting on the battery lifetime. My ThinkPad Carbon X1 gen 6 can do 10-12 hrs in Ubuntu, though I had to switch the bios sleep mode to Linux. Maybe the lack of an Nvidia graphics card helps.
I haven't done much special customization on the ThinkPad, other than updating the BIOS in Windows (it's dual boot) and changing the BIOS sleep setting. The sleep setting disables "Modern sleep", where the computer stays awake when sleeping, which isn't so well supported in Linux.
Currently I have 11 hours remaining, on 78% battery charge with a fairly dim screen (I use a setting to prevent the battery charging fully to extend its lifetime). Powertop shows a draw of 4.1W. Strangely the computer seems to run hotter in Windows and the battery lifetime is a bit shorter.
I'm using Ubuntu 18.04, running KDE. The laptop (Carbon X1 6th Gen) has a very nice keyboard, red trackpoint, 1TB NVMe SSD, 16GB RAM, i7-8550U CPU and a 2560x1440 display. It also has USB-C plus a couple of USB-A and HDMI sockets.
So many people I've talked to have never noticed the sharp edges of the mac pro. But they irritate the living crap out of me. After a few hours use, it starts to feel like I've been grinding my forearms with sandpaper.
Tangential public service announcement: Your forearms should not be digging into the edge of the laptop. If they are, you are positioning your hands and wrists in an uncomfortable and inefficient way which has a good chance of leading to RSI. Irrespective of the smoothness of the laptop corners, don’t do this!
Ideally you shouldn‘t be putting any significant pressure on any surface with your forearms, palms, or wrists while actively typing. You want your hands “floating” with the fingertips resting very lightly on the key tops. But even if you must rest your hands or arms on something, please keep your wrists as straight as possible, and especially avoid wrist flexion or extension.
The surface of your laptop should be more-or-less parallel with the plane of your forearms, with the keyboard kept close to your torso so that your shoulders can remain relaxed with your upper arms hanging down at your sides. (This reduces the torque your arms put on your shoulder, allowing you to comfortably support your arms without any need for external props.)
If you have a tall desk and a low chair, and can’t change furniture, the way to work around the poor furniture design is to either (a) move the laptop to a low tray or directly onto your lap, or (b) prop the back side of the laptop up so that the base of the laptop is tilted toward you, with the keyboard parallel to your forearms. Keep the laptop (or whatever other keyboard) near the edge of the desk.
This is a terrible argument to justify a poor design. There are plenty of times you need to use a laptop in non-ideal situations, such as a car or plane. The laptop should not punish you for having to operate it outside perfect conditions.
There is no condition where you should have your forearm digging into the front edge of the laptop.
If you come up with a body shape and context and I guarantee you we can come up with a more comfortable way to position the laptop than anything requiring wrists bent downward.
This is not about the design of the Macbook: the same goes for any other laptop, however smooth and soft its front edge might be.
Before I began to type this, I was resting my hands on the (thankfully hand-friendly) edge of my laptop, one finger on the page-down key. I probably do as much reading on my laptop as I do typing.
Some people use their laptops in wider situations than others. Having had creases pressed into my forearms by the edge of my MacBook while using it in various non-ideal and uncomfortable seating situation, usually on the go, I can easily say you are not one of them. Implying that we’re being dishonest or somehow incapable of using a keyboard is a bit insulting.
Huh? I don’t think anyone here is dishonest or incapable of using a keyboard. (Indeed, I’m convinced that idlewords is one of the most honest and generally capable people around.)
I said people who are digging their forearms into their laptop edges are probably bending their wrists down in a way that puts strain on the tendons used for typing (not to mention putting direct pressure on the tendon sheaths for the finger flexors), so they should be careful about RSI.
Yes this is true, but many of those ways put considerable strain on their hands and wrists and commonly lead to serious injury. If the forearms are digging into the corners of the laptop, that almost certainly means that the wrists are extended (bent downward), which puts the tendons/joints used for typing into a weak and injury-prone part of their range of motion.
People should do whatever works for them and listen to their own bodies, but should be really careful with computer keyboards. I know many professional computer-users who did themselves serious harm with significant impact to their careers.
If something hurts even a little bit, please don’t try to work through the pain.
Sometimes the pain is caused by a razor-sharp laptop edge, which is the point of the post. I type in two main positions–on my back like an otter, or lying face down on a mattress. I'm guessing some people here type suspended upside down from a gravity swing. The computer case design shouldn't punish us for our typing choices!
Lying on your back or lying face down or suspended from a gravity swing are all fine (albeit perhaps not ideal for very long stretches).
In none of these cases should your forearms be digging into the edge of the laptop. If they are something else is wrong about the position.
I occasionally type sitting on a couch, lying on my back on a bed, sitting at crappy furniture at a coffeeshop, sitting on the floor, with one hand on a tall table while tending to toddlers, etc.
In any of those contexts, it is possible to find a way of typing with straight wrists.
This really has nothing to do with the computer case design; the previous poster should adjust his or her posture irrespective of laptop choice. RSI is no joke.
When the unibody Mac first came out the edges were so sharp they sliced your wrists. It took a few years for them to finally release them with a small radius on the edge. Just a few mm made a huge difference. There were some YouTube videos of people sanding them down to make it more bearable. Terrible design decision to have such a sharp edge but somebody really wanted that "crisp" edge look.
Ditto on the cold/hot front. When I first worked on a macbook pro I thought if there's someway I could stick a layer of insulation on all the metal I had to make contact with. I frequently rest my palms and wrists on the keyboard pads and with metal as the only thing present I am forced to have this aluminium chassis constantly attempt to reach thermal equilibrium with my body temperature. Not fun.
The N95 sold well and was a solid great phone for the time.
However, the Nokia N95 suffered from a small screen 2.6 inches relative to the iPhone’s 3.5 inch display. It mostly sucked for web browsing, which seemed less import because all phones sucked for web browsing.
What separated the iPhone was a useful touch screen enabling large screens, an acceptable web browser even if it lacked flash etc, and an unlimited bandwidth option. If anything it was really bandwidth that changed how people used their phone.
The N95 and the iphone both sucked for web browsing. Websites just weren't made for small screens, you had to zoom in so far and links were hard to click. I wouldn't say the iPhone's browsing experience was any better than the rest, but perhaps that unlimited data plan (not bandwidth) changed things up.
In the iPhone's defense, vs the other smart phones I had used up until I got my iPhone 4, it was the first one to have a web browser that worked reasonably well on all non-mobile websites, and it was that factor alone at the time was enough to get me hooked.
Unexpectedly, MMS was so crappy at the time and full of spam that it was actually a feature for me. Total count of legit MMS I ever received was half a dozen, and again half of that that I sent.
(I did not own an iPhone 1, only a 3G one, but I skipped on MMS as hard as I could)
That's revisionist. People tend to forget that when the iphone was released it had no appstore and Apple was telling people to develop webapps. This was less functional than existing offerings on the market, but it sure looked and felt better.
People also tend to forget that it was incredibly refined already in v1. I remember hooking it up to my car and being super impressed that I could pick whether I wanted sound to go to the car, my phone, or my headphones. Each makes sense in a different context, but other products at the time assumed that as long as there was a BT connection available it should use that. They also clearly did some great usability work on touch targets. I could tap on links in web pages and it would do the right thing. Other phones, even if they had a decent browser (they didn’t), forced me to hunt for the magic touch target.
Blackberries were good at email, but otherwise they lost to Apple badly.
The original iPhone was revealed as three things: a phone, an iPod, and a revolutionary new browser. All three were true. I remember when I bought the first iPhone I was giddy how delightful Safari was, and it was the first smart phone to pass my “xkcd test” (could I figure out how to open a browser and type xkcd.com without getting forcibly corrected). It was also the best iPod and the first to introduce “visual voicemail”. It truly was revolutionary in visual and functional design.
No doubt, I was amazed when I first got my hands on one. The iphone got things right that had never been gotten before. But the fact remains that on the day it launched, there were other smartphones on the market that had more features. When the feature-sets overlapped, iphone was generally the clear winner, but if you tallied it all up, the iphone was clearly lacking a few obvious features that others had, such as the aforementioned third-party software, or even just the simple ability to copy-paste text (which didn't come to iphones until several iterations later as I recall.)
I'm curious when you say less functional than existing offerings you mean .... exactly what? Those java apps you could download from your cell phone carrier that ran incredibly slow? Or the robust ecosystem windows mobile <6 had at the time?.. Because Android wasn't out... I agree with foolfoolz, iphone raised the bar both functionally and visually, regardless of having a app store at launch.
> Or the robust ecosystem windows mobile <6 had at the time?
Huh? Windows CE and, later, Windows Mobile had quite a large number of apps for its era since the programming model was similar to desktop Windows (pre .NET) meaning that there was a ready-made base of developers for it. They weren't necessarily easy to find since the idea of an app store (and Apple/Google eating 30% of your revenue) didn't exist yet but they were there.
They had apps but the quality was low and prior to the Apple App Store’s standard terms discoverability was basically paying baksheesh to the the carriers – our clients were quoted a minimum of $50k per carrier just to be in the store, scaling up based on your perceived ability to pay.
There certainly where high quality applications for WinMo, and discovery was as simple as reading a forum or two. Sure, maybe not quite as easy as going to the app store and downloading some fake app that does absolutely nothing and steals your info, but it worked pretty well. And chances of the WinMo app being actually malicious were lower, too.,
Why do you say parenthetically pre .Net? I programmed ruggedized Windows Mobile devices around 2008 using both C++/MFC and .Net Compact Framework/Windows Forms and they were both just like programming on Windows.
The Palm/Treo app market was quite strong, I had several good and useful apps on my Treo 650 that integrated nicely with a desktop and made it a properly useful device. The app installation method was a bit primitive but there was absolutely a strong market for 3rd party apps.
hmmm - I have a blind spot for palm during that time, completely spaced them. I was a windows mobile power user 2003 thru version 5/6. I will take your word for it.
In an age before android or iphones, blackberry ruled the world. The iphone as it was released was a functional regression for blackberry power users. And it didn't catch on with that demographic until Apple iterated on the iphone to close the gap.
Nitpicks aside, if Blackberry preceded the iphone only in America, it still preceded the iphone. Note that I never claimed that predecessors to the iphone, with more functionality than the iphone, were also more commercially successful in America, let alone worldwide. Claiming that would be ridiculous.
Americans have a blind spot when it comes to smartphones pre-iPhone, because Nokia wasn't such a big player on that side of the pond. The Symbian S60 ecosystem was fairly well-developed, certainly by the standards of the time.
Nah I was a big fan of s60
Had the birth control 3650 with multiplayer snake. That phone upped the game, but thought we were talking about design and functionality. I wouldn’t call the 3650 a jump in functionality besides it included one of the first cameras stateside .
“The iPhone Is a Breakthrough Handheld Computer”, Walt Mossberg’s original review. Maybe not 1000x, but definitely multiple X better (especially compared to leading US phones).
My old Nokia E90 would beg to differ. It was released before the first iPhone, WiFi works very nice, thank you, has a full web browser, and worked more than well enough as an MP3 player.
It also sported a screen comparable to a "retina" display.
Whether you believe that to be true probably depends on whether you more frequently used email or the web. The Blackberry was great for messaging but the browser & other non-core apps were a bad joke.
Blackberry failed by not embracing apps. The app landscape was a mess of incompatibility, had poorly made apps, and no unified App Store. This where iOS killed Blackberry.
Umm, no, it was not. Even Windows Mobile was far more functional than iPhone. But iPhone looked cute, and had some ease of use affordances for people who could not be bothered actually learning anything (but then this had always been Apple's target audience).
Obviously, Apple did something (likely marketing, imho, and of course extreme ease of use) right to make the iPhone as popular as it is, but I would need to be convinced that it had something to do with functionality.
Windows CE was not functional with an easy to lose stylus, the touch screens were horrible and it was mostly a miniature Windows desktop. The apps were not exactly touch friendly.
The version of IE was unusable for most of the web. But you don’t think “extreme ease of use” made the iPhone more functional?
The devices we use to deploy were $1000-$2000 (ruggedized devices) so they definitely weren’t cheap devices for the time.
My first WinMo device (and still the most convenient smartphone I've ever had, the SCH-i760) was perfectly well operable 95% of the time even without the stylus -- there was a joystick (and a dialpad) on the front. I rarely had to actually use a stylus.
IE eventually got pretty useless, but unlike iPhone you could always load alternative browsers, shells, and what not.
Sorry, I am still seeing that yes, iPhone is easier to use, as long as you don't need to do much, but functional? Not back then. And whether capacitive or resistive screen is better is a big question -- at least resistive is far more precise.
i literally have both a macbook pro and a thinkpad x230 right now on my desk side by side, and i concur. the thinkpad keyboard is just so much more comfortable. it pains me to see how the newer thinkpads don't have that keyboard anymore.
if only i could find a more lightweight version the same size as the x230, then i'd probably stop using the mac.
> I'd much rather look at a mac book pro than a thinkpad. Next to the minimalist design of the mac, a thinkpad looks like you ripped out part of a server and started carrying it around.
Personally that's the aesthetic I want in a laptop.
I'll accept minimalism, though. Or anything that's not too flashy and doesn't scream GAMER.
From the article:
>In the first interview, he also admitted to admiring people who work on satellites, where you have to justify every iota of space consumed, every gram of weight, because they’re expensive and you only get one chance to get them right.
The thing is, laptops aren't satellites. I've never understood the obsession with saving even a pound of weight for a laptop. (OK, maybe if you're one of those people who flies a million miles a year.)
It's a tool, not an objet d'art or a satellite. The Thinkpad was the best expression of this idea. I've never liked using a Mac more than a Thinkpad. Maybe I'm strange that way, or maybe I'm just that much further skewed toward utility that it makes all the difference for me.
uh, even when just commuting to work every day, every gram saved makes a difference. when buying a new laptop, weight is my primary selection criteria, next is size and price, and only then any features. (although features factor into price)
the only time when weight is not a consideration is when getting a machine that i don't intend to move but just keep at home/work. but even then, i get annoyed when i occasionally have to carry around, or decide to change the purpose of the device.
While it is obvious that the 2013 "Trashcan" Mac Pro was not a successful design, it seems a lot of people don't get what Apple was going for.
Their goal was a computer heavily focused on multithreaded and OpenCL loads, as most vendors were still preaching to developers that the single threaded performance increase ramp was dead, and workload would have to scale out instead.
At the same time, it is quite easy to point to the Mac Pros before and after it and say that they have a lot of wasted power and space. The new Mac Pro design has a 1400W power supply and is mostly empty space to accommodate the "fully loaded" expansion options that most buyers quite frankly will not purchase.
As Thunderbolt is basically an externalized PCIe interface, there is certainly a case to be made that extensibility is better served as a separate unit. This allowed the design of the core system to forgo modularity, and have an extremely compact design. This also allowed them to have a reduced parts cost.
But the reality was:
- Component thermals did not stay balanced, with GPUs using far more power and giving off far more heat on the high end. This meant that there was a shortage of pro-level parts usable without redoing the core design.
- As Apple didn't upgrade the core design, it wound up having dated thunderbolt support.
- There is certainly an argument to be made that extensibility within the case is a cleaner, more manageable design for the end user
- Intel's licensing for Thunderbolt has been guarded, and thus the market has been sub-par. For example, eGPU took ages to become available. Another example - Intel forbid RAID assemblies to be sold without disks.
In the end, I personally see what they were trying to go for, but in a lot of ways the way they thought technology and needs would evolve were missed by the 2013 pro. I don't see an issue with the design based on where they thought things were going - the issue IMHO is that it took them six years to react with a new product.
(FWIW, I was planning to buy the second rev of the trashcan pro - which I slowly realized would never happen)
The trashcan was a bad design from day one. It was more oriented towards the pretentious developers instead of the professional developer. I suggest the new Mac Pro is as well. It is more about being seen with it than being able to use and considering its price point that exclusivity seems to have been an Apple goal, as in you are not worthy of our hardware if the price makes you flinch. Same for that monitor.
The new Mac Pro's modular feature ties you completely to Apple for GPU improvements, I did not verify if it also ties you to them for CPU upgrades. Simply put, they designed a system by which you are stuck with them that added cost but no value.
I am hoping that with Ive gone that we leave the pretentious era of Apple behind, the era that resulted in the trashcan, designer bands for a watch let alone a gold 10k watch, and even to the point of their new headquarters.
The trashcan wasn't oriented towards developers of any kind. In 2013, developers had no need for the dual AMD GPUs that you were forced to buy. It was oriented to people using Final Cut Pro (a pretty small market)
It has one major issue in that it's symmetrical and you sometimes pick it up the wrong way.
But other than that I love it. The touchpad is great with the Apple TV, especially once you figure out that you can single-tap the edges like a D-Pad for precision.
It lays flat, so you can tap the play/pause button on your coffee table rather than picking up the remote.
There are just enough buttons for the Apple TV functions, all of which are big and easy to press and work with a satisfying click. No mushy rubber.
I wouldn't want a game controller designed with the same sensibilities. That's something you're holding for hours at a time and needs to be designed for your hand.
But I don't need a "comfortable" cable remote. I'll take the nice objet d'art.
It drives me crazy that you can’t hold the Apple TV remote while watching tv for fear of accidental input. As soon as I turn something on, I set it down. Then, when I need it, I slowly reach for it, being careful not to inadvertently hit any buttons or swipe the touch pad.
When you’re using it, it’s fine. No complaints. But any time you’re not using it, it feels like a ticking time bomb waiting to mess up your show.
I love how these different usage patterns can make the same thing great for some and terrible for others. It reminds me of my experience on quite a few websites:
I'm one of those people who likes to select the text they're reading - or at least the first line or so of the paragraph I'm in. It helps me not lose track of where I am.
However, that means I'm often continuously selecting/double-clicking lines of text in an article. Unfortunately, some websites now show a popover menu next to text you select, e.g. to tweet that line of text. That popover menu often obscures the text I'm reading.
That's something that would go completely unnoticed when the design is tested on people that simply scroll down while they're reading.
Similarly but yet completely different I always positon the mouse cursor away from the text I'm reading, since I find the cursor distracting. Nowadays that sometimes has an annoying side effect: some news sites have video thumbnails in side columns. If the mouse cursors hovers over one of them for a few seconds, the browser opens the page with the full video. Gone is the article I was reading.
I don't understand what problem the developers were trying to solve with that feature/bug.
Completely agree. With HDMI-CEC and moving off of old Campos it is the only remote used in our house and nobody ever asks me how to do X. They click it, everything turns on and the navigate to the thing they want.
A bit of rubber on the lower half so could feel up from down would be my only change.
Yeah I use HDMI-CEC to turn on and off my TV from the Apple remote.
I use an HD HomeRun and the app Channels to watch local antenna TV via the Apple TV, so no need for channel buttons.
I do wish that the Apple TV volume buttons worked without HDMI-CEC so I could use those to control the volume when playing games. That and the occasional need for the Input button are the only reasons I keep the TV remote handy.
The fatal flaw of CEC, at least with my particular setup, is that there is no way to play music on my receiver via the Apple TV while having the TV off. When CEC is enabled, turning on the receiver turns on the TV, and turning off the TV turns off the receiver. It’s insanely frustrating, but hey, how could it know when I really don’t want to turn off the receiver?
my receiver (denon x1400) doesn't turn on the tv when it turns itself on, but the tv turns on the receiver and turns it off. i've set it up a long time ago but IIRC it was configurable.
I think that's approximately the issue with my setup as well (I also have a Denon receiver). I believe I settled on only disabling CEC on the TV. Thus waking up the Apple TV does turn on the receiver, and putting it to sleep turns off the receiver. I only have to manually turn the TV on and off, which isn't so bad. Ideally I would be able to configure it so that all CEC controls were active except that manually turning off the TV did not turn off any other device.
I have 2 Apple TV at home, and the symmetrical design drives me crazy.
The way I did fix it is that I put some ugly tape on the bottom of the remote.
Pretty sure Steve or Jony would hate to see what I ave did to their beautiful remote :-), But at least now I know how I am holding it with looking at it.
But once you do discover them, they're so much better than equivalent functionality on other media devices. Same asking Siri "What did they say?" to trigger brief subtitles.
And I disagree that they're "completely" undiscoverable... if you rest your thumb on the remote, skip forward/back glyphs appear on-screen and indicate the functionality if you were to click.
In my opinion the hated puck mouse is far and away better than the current Magic Mouse, which will will pretty much destroy your hands and give you carpal tunnel guaranteed. The puck mouse had an orientation trough on the button that was easy enough to get used to and, more importantly, was huge enough to be substantive and supportive under a hand. As far as I'm concerned the magic mouse is a class action lawsuit in a box. I used one daily for a few months once and it took years for my hand to recover.
I've been using Magic Mice for ten years without any problems. Was there a model that had different ergonomics than the rest? I think I've used all models. It's been my favourite mouse since I started using it (mainly for the touch functionality).
The magic mouse is certainly painful to move, however it would be interesting to see the actual impact on people's hands from it. Since getting one my behaviour has changed to move the mouse with a few fingers, and basically never move my hand. The sensor is very accurate so you can really crank up the movement in settings. This seems similar ergonomically to a trackball so i wonder if there is similar benefits.
Right, I have my wrist basically fixed on the desk and move the mouse with my fingertips. Only when I go very long distances on a large screen I occasionally lift my hand. Alternatively, I lift the mouse and drop it a few centimeters to the side.
The problem with the G3 iMac’s mouse was the cable. The low, round puck didn’t provide a good grip for fighting with the very stiff cable. If it had been wireless it would, I think, have been much more pleasant to hold. It’s not the case that a mouse has to be a blob-shaped fistful of plastic modeled after the MS Mouse 2.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Mouse#/media/File:Mi... to be comfortable to hold. Think how you hold a pen, or how a professional holds a kitchen knife.
I honestly don't know how the Magic Mouse is meant to be used for extended lengths of time. The touch surface means that not only do your index and middle fingers need to be held hovering above it, but the rest of your fingers also need to claw in from the sides to keep overhangs of skin from triggering stray cursor movements. It is truly painful to use.
Maybe you used one with older firmware or an older model?
Currently using one as I type, the stray / static finger rejection is near perfect and I can easily scroll with my index finger with my middle finger and edge of my palm resting on the surface.
You don't need to hold the non-clicking fingers over the mouse for longer time, just lift them slightly when clicking, so a click becomes one finger pressing down, the others slightly moving back in parallel.
Indeed, I never really had to develop a strategy, just started using it and used it since. Only thing I did was install magicprefs to make it slightly faster and never thought about the rest. Compared to the generic Microsoft-branded wireless mouse I used about 8 years ago with my PC, the difference is night and day. That mouse, designed for both left and right-handed people messed me up so much that my pink went numb for months even after I stopped using it. The magic mouse is much more comfortable than it looks, strangely enough.
You can't see the bad design on a picture: To perform a right-click, you have to lift your left finger up from the touchable area, then click on the right half with your middle finger. You can't just permanently rest your fingers on top of the buttons as with other mice.
You're welcome to your opinion, but that's almost pure FUD.
Somehow millions are using Magic mice without getting injured. Obviously, one device isn't going to work for everyone... and fortunately no one is try to make that happen.
For me, the magic mouse is the best mouse I ever used. I am using BetterTouchTool to configure its touchpad part though. The mouse is very thin, so my hand comfortably rests on the desk and I can do all actions with my fingers. The big win though is, that I have perfect scrolling in y and x direction, something missing by all other mice I know of. I can use the whole back of the mouse for clicking. Especially nice is the ability to switch desktops or activate expose with multi-finger swipes.
I even mange to play StarCraft using the magic mouse.
I just bought a new Mac and spent all of ten seconds looking at the "well-designed" Apple keyboard and mouse before buying the best third-party input devices I've ever had for less than half the cost. The Magic Mouse looks like it was build by someone who has never used a mouse in their life. The stupid little ball is so small it's basically impossible to scroll to boot.
Yes, they're talking about an old mouse. "just" has multiple meanings. As far as I can tell they used "just" to mean "simply", not "recently". They "just" replaced the mouse quickly and decisively, many years ago.
Some of that must be due to the features and gestures MacOS offers but I generally use my personal laptop at home without an external screen, keyboard, etc. because I never wanted to use a Windows / Linux machine with the trackpad a second more than I had to. I didn't expect much from my Macbook when I bought my first one and ended up using it almost exclusively with the touchpad only. From what I hear Microsoft's been trying to catch up with some new updated drivers, though according to LinusTechTips, they're still not there.
I used to have a Logitech G700 mouse for my old Windows machine and it had this ability to unlock the scroll wheel for smooth / fast scrolling but it was a disaster due to Windows' shoddy support of it. More often than not it just overloaded the window with scroll events and it bingbonged from the speakers for a while until the scroll events stopped. Glad to see that at least that's getting addressed.
I don't know why, but Apple has constantly had bad mice.
The hockey puck is mentioned in the article which is probably the worst mouse Apple has made.
Then came the Apple Pro Mouse (the transparent one) which didn't have a scroll wheel and IIRC didn't have a right click either. In the early 00s those features were super common. I remember having a Microsoft's Intellimouse with a scroll wheel in the late 90s.
Then came the Mighty Mouse. Apple added the scroll ball and right click but the scroll ball was prone to failure. Mine died after 6 months of use because the ball got a bit of dirt. Unfortunately it wasn't possible to open the mouse to clean the ball without breaking it.
Then came the Magic Mouse 1. Apple added the touch functionality but the mouse was pretty heavy including the weight of the batteries and IMO the noise of the click was quite annoying. Apple worked on the weight problem with v2 by adding their own battery, but they added the charging port at the bottom of the mouse (facepalm). Not sure if the noise of the click was solved, I didn't personally try v2.
> but they added the charging port at the bottom of the mouse (facepalm)
Reminds me of the 1968 VW Camper Bus. (My dad had one.) You can always tell the 68's because the gas filler was located on the right rear quarter panel. When you were filling up, and opened the sliding door, it would shear off the gas pump.
Then, when minivans started having sliding doors on both sides, the problem returned. Pretty sure our minivan won't let us open the driver-side door if the gas door is open.
> they added the charging port at the bottom of the mouse (facepalm).
I thought this was incredibly stupid until I actually used one. The battery lasts so long and charges so fast that it's not a problem, to the point that I wouldn't pay so much as a dollar to "fix" it by moving the port to the edge.
I dislike the inconsistency where the corresponding keyboard is a USB keyboard with a cable connected, but the mouse isn't (and physically couldn't be).
If you 1) don't plug it in at all for several weeks, including 2) ignoring low battery warnings for multiple days near the end, then you're looking at like 15min of making coffee and taking a walk around the building to let it charge enough to finish out the day, if, say, you sat down at your desk in the morning and it was already dead. Or 15min of using your trackpad if you're using it with a Macbook. But it's the kind of thing you'd have to be almost trying to do to have it happen even once a year. The crazy-good battery life and very fast charging are what make it such a non-issue.
If it had an edge plug I'd probably have started off using it plugged in all the time, though, just because I'm so used to battery powered peripherals being so shitty that not plugging them in when there's an opportunity is a bad move. Kinda like how it took a period of adjustment when I started using Macbooks to get used to my laptop being usable long enough on battery power that I didn't need to constantly be looking for power outlets, or carting my power supply everywhere I went.
I don't know if it would be a once-a-year event. That happens more frequently to me with the the Magic Keyboard 2. Thankfully I can connect it and keep working.
Not just the mice themselves. For a long time, Macs had an insane mouse pointer acceleration curve. It required long movements in order to move the pointer anywhere beyond the immediate area, and it affected both the trackpad and wired mice.
Back when I switched from Windows to Mac in 2006, I found this perhaps the most disruptive aspect; everything else was pretty standard GUI stuff, but the mouse behaviour was a nightmare. Windows had a different acceleration curve that felt super snappy (at the cost of a loss of precision), whereas on the Mac it was sluggish; it was a chore to get the mouse pointer to move anywhere.
For years I ran various apps that would fix the acceleration, including a tool from SteelSeries. I wasn't alone in being frustrated — forums were full of discussions about this. I'm not sure what happened or when, but I haven't needed that app in a long time. Apple must have changed the acceleration curve — I don't see any other explanation. Perhaps it came with the attempts at unifying the trackpad with iOS gestures, which require a 1:1 correspondence of your movement with what happens on the screen.
I switched to Mac in 2007 and that drove me crazy too. For years I used some app[1] that imitated the Windows acc. curves but even with that it never felt as good as Windows.
Never had that issue with the trackpad though, only with mice.
Not sure when Apple change those, or if I just got used to the Mac curves over the years.
I don't understand how Apple TV remote ever came into being, let alone how it still exists. Even when you somehow break the symmetry, in my case by sticking an ugly address label on the bottom part, skating around the screen with the touch pad is a game of skill that you are forced to play when all you want to do is just select a damn thing on the screen. Not to mention having to undo whatever I've done by touching the touch pad every time I grab the thing.
You're not alone in this, I believe it's the lowest rated item on the apple store (2 stars) and the vast majority of reviews are single stars. It's rubbish.
It doesn't even need letter/number buttons, just some proper tactile feedback rather than this smooth hello-my-owner-has-more-money-than-sense rotating action thing i.e. the scroll wheel on an iPod classic from the mid 2000s was miles better.
Ok, granted it is slippery, hard to orient, unergonomic, and the buttons are mistake prone, but I actually really like using the touchpad on the occasional time I actually pick up the remote with the correct end forward. It's really nice to be able to move with decent speed around a UI instead of using crappy and hard to press arrow keys.
Note: I've actually perfected a flick-of-the-wrist so that I can reorient the remote quickly when I pick it up wrong.
All the designers I've worked with have all put beauty over function. That's just who they are. I suspect that if they emphasized function their career would have been greatly impacted towards the negative.
One big project that comes to mind is The Getty Museum in Los Angeles -at a billion dollar cost. The architecture is beautiful but it lacks function. Getting around the museum as a visitor is like entering a mase. I'm sure you could not convince the architect that he should have changed it. I don't have the know how to know if it could have been designed with an emphasis towards function. But I do know that it's beautiful so in my mind, the architect was a genius.
I have never been to the Getty, but from my experience going to plenty of other museums it has always seemed like getting "lost" was the whole point. You can remove yourself from the real world for a bit and have total focus on the exhibition.
Designers should tend to put emphasis on beauty, otherwise they would just be called engineers. I'm not a designer either, but I think the secret sauce is convincing users (of hardware, software, no matter) that form followed function. Ive is most certainly a designer so the changes he made, e.g. removing ports, were driven by aesthetic rather than function. Without the checks and balances named Steve Jobs these were allowed to ship, and is a reason why Apple is getting a bad rap.
The Guggenheim in New York is another example of this. I've heard it told that the reason the bathrooms are all tucked away under stairwells and in other awkward places is because their inclusion at all was a detail the architect originally overlooked.
The article points out some very high visibility things that Ive was either responsible for, or at least signed off on. The author though misses what I think is the one that has had the most impact on people - Apple's insistence on removal of strain relief on cables.
Apple's cables have for generations now been fraying and cracking all because someone decided that strain relief was an unsightly and unnecessary thing.
It could be forgiven if it was on one era of products, and learned their lesson when people started getting electrical shocks, devices started dying, and things being set on fire - but no, they persist.
Even today they've only made the most minor of attempts at introducing strain relief.
All because they optimise for short-term design over long-term function, because there's no decent negative feedback loop into consumer decision making at point-of-purchase for many minor defects (and even major ones such as the Apple butterfly keyboard disaster).
If there was a requirement for manufacturers-at-scale to display visual overviews of potential defects over time due to normal use - and with the same prominence as the marketing material:
* a laptop with stressed / broken cables
* a defective keyboard
* inputs in iPhones that appear to fail due to microscopic dust / debris accumulation
then you'd have a forcing function which addresses the information asymmetry in consumer transactions and perhaps you'd quickly see a lot more attention directed at these kind of product defects.
Of course this kind of thought-bubble regulation might be totally unworkable: how do you determine thresholds of wear and tear considering 'correct use' as considered by manufacturer vs 'real-world' use by user base. But then again doesn't good design consider the practical over the theoretical reality wrt product usage?
Others have already helpfully provided pictures of the common stuff.
It's used where you have a flexible material in contact with a rigid material. Most commonly on electronics it's on cables - between connectors and either connectors (when removable) or into the case/device (when fixed).
The strain relief prevents all the stress (from bending, induced by movement or just gravity) being placed on one location and spreads it out.
Once you know what strain relief is, and you look around at all the cables/hoses/etc in your life - you start seeing them everywhere.
Headphones, Keyboards, Network cables, power cables, USB cables. Just sitting at my desk I can see a dozen or more of them.
I don't think strain reliefs is the issue as much as the thinness of the cables. The magsafe power supplies do have minimal strain reliefs[1] but the insulation cracks at the end of the relief. If you tape up or reinforce the ends with tape, as I've done on numerous cables, they'll eventually crack and fray at the end of the tape. I've learned to just be very careful winding and unwinding mine and have them last for years. My kids aren't as careful so I just keep adding tape to theirs.
It's not just the lack of strain relief. As 'paranoidroibot noted in a sibling comment, the magsafe2 cables have more of it, but there seems to be some sort of degradation in whatever they're using as insulation -- the magsafe end of my cable is noticeably yellow and stiff compared to the rest of the cable. In fact this is my second cable, the first one having failed due to the insulation splitting after showing the same symptoms. This is in contrast to my earphone cables that have thinner insulation and more wind/unwind cycles yet are still going strong.
Perhaps. I'd be inclined to believe more if it wern't for Apple and Ive's focus on the beauty of their products at the expense of everything else, including usability. The article itself goes over a bunch of examples of this.
Strain relief is, or can be, somewhat ugly. More angles, thicker cables, varying widths - it all adds up to muddying the lines of their product.
Compared to how much they make on device sales - selling a few more adapters is peanuts. How many people do you know that have downright dangerous cables which they persist in using? I'm sure I know dozens.
It might not be one or the other. In a profit driven company, outcomes which result in a material benefit to the bottom line have an easy time being justified even if the justification used is not explicitly related to profit.
I had the same feeling about the evolution of the magsafe connector. The second generation, for which the cable ran parallel to the edge of the laptop where you plugged it in, was an upgrade in every way over its predecessor. The way it was constructed, and the forces you would typically put on it from day to day use made it much more robust than the T-shaped design.
But despite the obvious advantages, the next generation went back to the old design, but a little bit smaller, and back to all the old issues. I probably spent a few hundred dollars on replacement 3rd gen chargers alone, while the 2nd gen charger which came with my laptop is still in perfect working order in a box in my closet.
The cynical of me honestly wonders if they didn't see a decrease in peripheral revenue after the first iteration, and reverted to the old design only because of that.
There's lot of focus in this article on failure. I enjoy Apple bashing as much as the next guy, but one has to assume in the same 20 years Apple's head of design would have had as many, if not more successes?
I've seen a bunch of anti-Ive comments and articles here recently. Is everyone just picking out all failures and attributing them to him and design successes to Jobs? Is that really representative and based in truth? The article reads as conjecture which makes me wonder about the authors motivation.
Hello, article author here. You wrote:
"There's lot of focus in this article on failure. I enjoy Apple bashing as much as the next guy, but one has to assume in the same 20 years Apple's head of design would have had as many, if not more successes?"
I point out in the article that Ive (plus Jobs) undoubtedly saved Apple. Without Ive, and the inspirational design of the first iMac, Apple would now be a footnote in history. The Apple Watch is a good design. The "sunflower" iMac was a good design. The unibody MacBook Pro is a good design. The 2001 Titanium laptop was a fantastic design. The iPhone 5 was a delightful design. There's a long, long list of good products. There's also a list of less good products, and I cited some of them.
I use and enjoy Apple products every day. But nothing and nobody should be above careful critique. My motivation was to point out that Ive leaving isn't necessarily a disaster, because he didn't always get it right, and to cite some examples to back that up.
(edited to replace attempt at blockquote HTML with "".)
Jobs made Ive, very publicly, which made Ive untouchable. I think what you're hearing is a mix of catharsis and a hope that someone in Cupertino will actually take note of some of it. The 2012 retina MacBook an the various iPhones were probably the high water mark for the Jobs-Ive collaboration. It is well known that Ives proposed and Jobs disposed. Lacking the disposer, the increased rate of fails was just half a notch higher, but that was the half notch that sent a lot of folks over the edge.
I think this reading appeals to our human desire to interpret things as personality-driven narratives, but I'm not convinced it's accurate. I think many of "Ive's missteps", and the behavior of Apple post-Jobs can be adequately explained by market forces and changes in the incentive structure driving Apple's product development.
During that period, Apple went from being a somewhat niche player for digital artists and enthusiasts to being one of most valuable brands on the planet. They went from having to work very hard to convince consumers that they were worth taking a risk on, to being a coveted status symbol which some customers would pay virtually anything for. I don't think it's surprising that during this period they would push their product line toward higher-margin, less utilitarian products you might want to replace more often for their various flaws.
I also don't think it's surprising that we're seeing Apple signaling a shift towards their old, pro-consumer ways now that the smartphone market is weakening.
Yes it's compelling to think about things in terms of the interplay of a few individuals, and the hubris of a rouge designer, but in general understanding the behavior of corporations through the lens of incentive structures is much more accurate.
I'm surprised the article didn't mention the Lightning-charged Magic Mouse given the infamous memes.
(IMO, it's not bad design; you're not supposed to be using it plugged-in 24/7, you're supposed it to plug it in for occasions when you aren't using the mouse anyways)
But there's no easy and obvious way to make a good cable connector that will make the mouse usable during charging. You could add a connector that works somewhat poorly, on the theory that those shortcomings don't matter since the mouse will only be plugged in occasionally and briefly. But if you do that then many users will in fact leave the mouse plugged in permanently, "just in case", effectively transforming it, in their experience, from a nice wireless mouse to a dodgy wired mouse. (It's much the same story if you add a connector which is mechanically robust and doesn't make the mouse feel horrible to use while in use, but makes it laborious to plug and unplug the cable.) Now you could argue that the decision to avoid that is patronising design, or manipulative design, or design that doesn't respect the user's authority. But it's not an obvious mistake, at least.
> But if you do that then many users will in fact leave the mouse plugged in permanently, "just in case", effectively transforming it, in their experience, from a nice wireless mouse to a dodgy wired mouse.
I had a reasonably cheap wireless mouse back in the early 2000s which could take rechargable lithium batteries and charge them with a wire that also allowed me to use the mouse at the same time.
I'm no power user, that device lasted me years and the reason it's still not used all the time is the cable frayed and died after 10 years.
What's wrong with being able to use it as a wired mouse? Apple's bluetooth keyboard can be used as a wired keyboard for people that want that or in emergencies.
"There was yet another mouse, with a bizarre charge-my-belly design. Everyone else would have put a Lightning port on the front or back, or even had a recessed horizontal port beneath so you could keep using the thing while it charged."
As a user of the said mouse, I agree with you: it is not a bad design. I would be surprised if those claiming otherwise have never used one. This is common with Apple critics: many a quick to criticize things or solutions without ever trying.
I think the best observation in the article is the one about "as simple as possible, but no simpler", but Apple under Ives too often forgetting the second part.
I've come to dislike the copycat trends that Apple's stringent design ethos has unleashed. Sure, it's occasionally been brilliant but the article does a good job outlining the significant errors - and other posters here fill in the blanks.
I'm glad the end of the Ives era seems to be sparking some healthy reassessment and introspection in the industry.
> Given that the yields are said to be worse for the “butterfly” keys than normal scissor keys, and that they’re more expensive to make, one can only think that either Apple is stubborn as hell at the executive level, or so tightly constrained by its design goals that it can’t figure out a way to reintroduce scissor-switch keys because that would mean designing an entirely new body and case for the whole line.
I think the author underestimates large scale production pipelines, where you may be many years out (due to things like design, test, assembly creation, assembly optimization, backchannel buildup, etc). Most products are several years in development before they are released.
The thing that drives me crazy on the remote is that the buttons aren't backlit. I can't think of a better use of backlit keys. A $5 rubber case fixes the ergonomic issues, but in a dark room, not being able to see the buttons, which are impossible for me to memorize, pisses me off.
My wife, kids and I have slowly been replacing all our Apple products over the past couple of years. We've replace the kid's MacBook Airs with MS Surface and my MBP was replaced with an MSI laptop with proper dedicated GPU.
The decision to change was quite natural. The kids like the Surface and how it was a touch screen, but could also be used as a laptop that they could do school work on.
Moving to Windows was easy for me once WSL was introduced. I no longer needed OSX to do development as I am now able to do everything I was doing on my MBP on my MSI in WSL.
I still can't believe that Apple has yet to come out with a laptop with a touch screen that isn't an iPad. The touchbar is very clever, but I never use it.
The last couple of straws for me for moving off of Apple at 10+ years was the MBP. Touch Bar, shitty keyboard, and no proper USB ports....I hate having to keep dongles at the ready.
For me, at least, the magic that was Apple died when Steve died. Now they just push out product and services and nothing that can be considered "magic" or unique.
I've always wondered why the camera sticks out in the more recent iPhones. Do they hedge bets that people will put a case on? Without a case, it bothers me that it can't lay flat on a table, desk, etc...
i never put a case on my iphone x. the biggest problem? it keeps sliding everywhere. the glass surface is so smooth that it never catches grip.
this is a major design flaw. their solution? put a case on (facepalm)
I read this article from start to finish. It never gets off the ground, so I don't recommend bothering. There are much more interesting critiques of Ive's design.
The colorful iMac and iBook were a fun for the times reaction to the banality of mostly beige and sometimes black boxes most 90's computer users were used to seeing.
You have to kind of look at and consider them in the context of their time.
I do kind of miss fun colored devices. We're in a new era of beige with all this brushed aluminum and glass. I really would love some funky colored electronics again.
Well, I felt that the original theme was far more attractive than trying to imitate grey brushed metal. However, it also seemed gratuitously hostile to the color blind. I never understood why the window controls eliminated the symbols that the original Mac OS and Windows used.
The article contains here-say mixed with facts about how bad Apple’s design process. It’s worth pointing out that while there have been some failures there have been some beautiful successes too. I love how the author blames the design team for complicating the touch wheel in one design, who knows if this is true it just fits with the narrative that is trying to be told.
My guess is that all of this is a lot more complicated than the author thinks and the road to simplicity is a very difficult one that has changed our technical devices for the better (overall). We’d still have plastic phones with “ergonomic” slide out keyboards if it was up to the author.
I'm not usually an Apple apologist, but I appreciate their tenacity in trying to turn beautiful visual design into genuinely functional design.
They might fail at it, but it feels like they put a stake in the sand, and then run to get there. Sometimes they trip up and don't get there (Magic Mouse 2, "you're holding it wrong"), and sometimes they do (MBPr, Watch, several iterations of iPhone).
I don't have the disposable income to fund said tenacity at the bleeding edge (in case they do trip), but my iPad Mini v2 and MBPr are both examples of a product they doubled-down on and got right from both ends.
Sorry for my shorthand, but "MBPr" is usually used to refer to "Macbook Pro Retina", so the c.2015 model. That one they very much got right from a usability and aesthetic perspective.
I love a lot of Apple’s design, but there is one particular example that frustrates me often: the mouse that comes with the iMac Pro. It perfectly illustrates Jobs’ mantra that design isn’t just about looks.
The problem is that in order to produce the beautiful silhouette, they put the charging port on the bottom. I never seem to remember to charge the thing, so it’s always needing to be plugged-in. And then you can’t use.
What I find bonkers about this is that mice were wired for the majority of their existence, so it’s not like this was a hard one to figure out. They just chose to go with what looked nice.
After long distain, I finally adapted to the Magic Mouse:
Movable trackpad.
I now nudge it around a bit and then take my hand off to do the gestures on the top surface. Previously, I tried to continue holding it while doing gestures, and it's way too small for my hands.
I still prefer the trackpad, but now the Magic Mouse feels usable.
“In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service” Steve Jobs
Agree. The back glass was not completely practical, but mine survived plenty of drops, and the whole thing had a nice weight/density to it, and a very premium feel.
The closest thing I have felt to its just solid feel is my essential phone. don't get me wrong - it is not a good phone, but the build quality is unbelievable.
I loved my cube which I tuned with new graphics cards, processor cards - there was a whole community around extending cubes with hardware without active cooling.
I think the author of this article thinks a design team is run as some sort of isolated dictatorship. In reality design teams balance stakeholder feedback, technical constraints, timelines and so on.
That's how it works when different teams within a company have an ideal balance of power. When everything's correctly balanced, the right people make the right decisions, and help to correct each other's wrong decisions.
I bet at most companies though, there isn't an ideal balance of power between teams, or between the different divisions of a company. I don't think that balance happens naturally. It might even become harder to maintain that balance, as a company becomes more successful.
Supposedly Microsoft during the Ballmer years was known for political conflict between the Office and Windows divisions. Sometimes what would be good for one (putting Office on as many platforms as possible) might be bad for the other one (the Windows people might want Office on as few platforms as possible). Conflicts like that are inevitable, but resolving them can be a crap shoot. If there's a lack of executive leadership, or a political power imbalance between the groups, the wrong group can win sometimes.
I really like the Apple TV remote. It takes some time getting used but once you are, you can navigate within any app so very quickly. Even in this comment thread, I can see this is a polarizing topic - but I am going to disagree that it is a terrible design.
A story recounted here last year [0]:
During the development of the first iPhone, Ive and his team became enamored with the look of an extruded aluminum prototype. Even though it was immediately apparent that the model's sharp edges made it physically painful to use as a phone, they persisted in trying to push the design and paper over its principal practical problems. It took Steve Jobs to finally step in, point out the obvious, and check Jony Ive's worst tendencies. [1]
Steve Jobs is gone, and nobody is left to fulfill his roles.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17056930
[1]: https://www.cultofmac.com/488008/jony-ive-book-excerpt-iphon...